4917 books match the query 'Philosophy' and 136 start with f

cover of For an Ontology of Morals: A Critique of Contemporary Ethical Theory

For an Ontology of Morals

A Critique of Contemporary Ethical Theory

Henry B. Veatch

Northwestern University Press, 1971

For an Ontology of Morals: A Critique of Contemporary Ethical Theory assesses contemporary trends in ethical theory, including the deontological tradition dating back to Kant, the teleological tradition of the utilitarians, the analytic movement, and the existentialist-phenomenologist movement. In refuting these trends, Henry B. Veatch argues that moral and ethical distinctions cannot be rightly or adequately understood if they are regarded simply as matters of linguistic use but are grounded in the very being and nature of things. 
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cover of For and Against Method: Including Lakatos's Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence

For and Against Method

Including Lakatos's Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence

Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend

University of Chicago Press, 1999

The work that helped to determine Paul Feyerabend's fame and notoriety, Against Method, stemmed from Imre Lakatos's challenge: "In 1970 Imre cornered me at a party. 'Paul,' he said, 'you have such strange ideas. Why don't you write them down? I shall write a reply, we publish the whole thing and I promise you—we shall have a lot of fun.' " Although Lakatos died before he could write his reply, For and Against Method reconstructs his original counter-arguments from lectures and correspondence previously unpublished in English, allowing us to enjoy the "fun" two of this century's most eminent philosophers had, matching their wits and ideas on the subject of the scientific method.

For and Against Method opens with an imaginary dialogue between Lakatos and Feyerabend, which Matteo Motterlini has constructed, based on their published works, to synthesize their positions and arguments. Part one presents the transcripts of the last lectures on method that Lakatos delivered. Part two, Feyerabend's response, consists of a previously published essay on anarchism, which began the attack on Lakatos's position that Feyerabend later continued in Against Method. The third and longest section consists of the correspondence Lakatos and Feyerabend exchanged on method and many other issues and ideas, as well as the events of their daily lives, between 1968 and Lakatos's death in 1974.

The delight Lakatos and Feyerabend took in philosophical debate, and the relish with which they sparred, come to life again in For and Against Method, making it essential and lively reading for anyone interested in these two fascinating and controversial thinkers and their immense contributions to philosophy of science.

"The writings in this volume are of considerable intellectual importance, and will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the development of the philosophical views of Lakatos and Feyerabend, or indeed with the development of philosophy of science in general during this crucial period."—Donald Gillies, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (on the Italian edition)

"A stimulating exchange of letters between two philosophical entertainers."—Tariq Ali, The Independent

Imre Lakatos (1922-1974) was professor of logic at the London School of Economics. He was the author of Proofs and Refutations and the two-volume Philosophical Papers. Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) was educated in Europe and held numerous teaching posts throughout his career. Among his books are Against Method; Science in a Free Society; Farewell to Reason; and Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend, the last published by the University of Chicago Press.
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cover of For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of Belief

For the Sake of Argument

Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of Belief

Eugene Garver

University of Chicago Press, 2004

What role does reason play in our lives? What role should it play? And are claims to rationality liberating or oppressive? For the Sake of Argument addresses questions such as these to consider the relationship between thought and character. Eugene Garver brings Aristotle's Rhetoric to bear on practical reasoning to show how the value of such thinking emerges when members of communities deliberate together, persuade each other, and are persuaded by each other. That is to say, when they argue.

Garver roots deliberation and persuasion in political friendship instead of a neutral, impersonal framework of justice. Through incisive readings of examples in modern legal and political history, from Brown v. Board of Education to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he demonstrates how acts of deliberation and persuasion foster friendship among individuals, leading to common action amid diversity. In an Aristotelian sense, there is a place for pathos and ethos in rational thought. Passion and character have as pivotal a role in practical reasoning as logic and language.
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cover of Force and Form: Philosophy of Life in the Age of Goethe

Force and Form

Philosophy of Life in the Age of Goethe

Stephen Klemm

Bucknell University Press, 2027

This book offers a bold rethinking of how modern ideas of life, nature, and subjectivity took shape in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century German thought. Moving beyond familiar narratives based on Kantian autonomy or Romantic irrationalism, it uncovers a vitalist tradition stretching from Herder to Schiller and Goethe, one that understood nature as dynamic, self-forming, and internally animated by life-force. Drawing on philosophy, the life sciences, and aesthetics, this innovative study reveals how these thinkers challenged mechanistic models of matter and resisted strict divisions between mind and nature. In doing so, they developed a historically contingent and embodied concept of subjectivity in which reason emerges from natural, cultural, and physiological processes rather than standing outside them. By situating this tradition within debates about epigenesis, form, and development, the book not only reshapes our understanding of German intellectual history but also sheds new light on contemporary debates about naturalism, posthumanism, and theories of life.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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cover of Force, Drive, Desire: A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis

Force, Drive, Desire

A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis

Rudolf Bernet, Translated from the French by Sarah Allen

Northwestern University Press, 2019

In Force, Drive, Desire, Rudolf Bernet develops a philosophical foundation of psychoanalysis focusing on human drives. Rather than simply drawing up a list of Freud’s borrowings from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, or Lacan’s from Hegel and Sartre, Bernet orchestrates a dialogue between philosophy and psychoanalysis that goes far beyond what these eminent psychoanalysts knew about philosophy. By relating the writings of Freud, Lacan, and other psychoanalysts to those of Aristotle, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and, more tacitly, Bergson and Deleuze, Bernet brings to light how psychoanalysis both prolongs and breaks with the history of Western metaphysics and philosophy of nature.
 
Rereading the long history of metaphysics (or at least a few of its key moments) in light of psychoanalytic inquiries into the nature and function of drive and desire also allows for a rewriting of the history of philosophy. Specifically, it allows Bernet to bring to light a different history of metaphysics, one centered less on Aristotelian substance (ousia) and more on the concept of dunamis—a power or potentiality for a realization toward which it strives with all its might. Relating human drives to metaphysical forces also bears fruit for a renewed philosophy of life and subjectivity.
 
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cover of Foreplay: Hannah Arendt, the Two Adornos, and Walter Benjamin

Foreplay

Hannah Arendt, the Two Adornos, and Walter Benjamin

Carl Djerassi

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno were intellectual giants of the first half of the twentieth century. The drama Foreplay explores their deeply human and psychologically intriguing private lives, focusing on professional and personal jealousies, the mutual dislike of Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, the association between Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille, and the border between erotica and pornography.

            Djerassi’s extensive biographical research brings to light many fascinating details revealed in the dialogues among the characters, including Adorno’s obsession with his dreams, Benjamin’s admiration for Franz Kafka, and the intimate correspondence between Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin. The introduction of a fictitious character, Fräulein X, intensifies the complex interplay among the four lead protagonists and allows for a comparison of Adorno’s philandering and the similar behavior of Martin Heidegger, whose affair with Hannah Arendt is well known. Foreplay brims with intrigue and the friction created when strong personalities clash.
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cover of Forgiveness

Forgiveness

Vladimir Jankélévitch

University of Chicago Press, 2005

Philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch has only recently begun to receive his due from the English-speaking world, thanks in part to discussions of his thought by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Paul Ricoeur. His international readers have long valued his unique, interdisciplinary approach to philosophy’s greatest questions and his highly readable writing style.
Originally published in 1967, Le Pardon, or Forgiveness, is one of Jankélévitch’s most influential works. In it, he characterizes the ultimate ethical act of forgiving as behaving toward the perpetrator as if he or she had never committed the action, rather than merely forgetting or rationalizing it—a controversial notion when considering events as heinous as the Holocaust.
Like so many of Jankélévitch’s works, Forgiveness transcends standard treatments of moral problems, not simply generating a treatise on one subject but incorporating discussions of topics such as free will, giving, creativity, and temporality. Translator Andrew Kelley masterfully captures Jankélévitch’s melodic prose and, in a substantive introduction, reviews his life and intellectual contributions. Forgiveness is an essential part of that legacy, and this indispensable English translation provides key tools for understanding one of the great Western philosophers of the twentieth century.
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cover of Forgiveness & Reconciliation: Public Policy & Conflict Transformation

Forgiveness & Reconciliation

Public Policy & Conflict Transformation

Raymond G. Helmick

Templeton Press, 2001

 This book brings together a unique combination of experts in conflict resolution and focuses on the role forgiveness can play in the process. It deals with theology, public policy, psychological and social theory, and social policy implementation of forgiveness. This book is essential for libraries, scholars, conflict negotiators, and all people who hope to understand the role of forgiveness in the peace process.

The book's first section explores how ideas like "forgiveness" and "reconciliation" are moving out from the seminary and academy into the world of public policy and how these terms have been used and defined in the past. The second section looks at forgiveness and public policy. One of the chapters, by Donald W. Shriver Jr., addresses forgiveness in a secular political forum.

The third section of the book draws us to a more thorough analysis of the relationship between forgiveness and reconciliation from voices in the academic and theological community, and the final section highlights the work of practitioners currently working with religion, public policy, and conflict transformation, particularly in areas such as Ireland and Africa. 

Contributors include Desmond M. Tutu, Rodney L. Petersen, Miroslav Volf, Stanley S. Harakas, Raymond G. Helmick, SJ, Joseph V. Montville, Douglas M. Johnston, Donna Hicks, Donald W. Shriver, Jr., Everett L. Worthington, Jr., John Paul Lederach, Ervin Staub, Laurie Anne Pearlman, John Dawson, Audrey R. Chapman, Olga Botcharova, Anthony da Silva, SJ, Geraldine Smythe, OP, Andrea Bartoli, Ofelia Ortega, and George F. R. Ellis.

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cover of Form and Being: Studies in Thomistic Metaphysics (Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, Volume 45)

Form and Being

Studies in Thomistic Metaphysics (Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, Volume 45)

Lawrence Dewan, O.P.

Catholic University of America Press, 2006

Contains thirteen essays by Lawrence Dewan on metaphysics, the vision of reality from the viewpoint of being.
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cover of Formal Methods and Empirical Practices: Conversations with Patrick Suppes

Formal Methods and Empirical Practices

Conversations with Patrick Suppes

Roberta Ferrario and Viola Schiaffonati

CSLI, 2012

The philosopher Patrick Suppes has developed a unique and influential approach to studying the foundations of science—he combines an understanding of the main principles of scientific theories in axiomatic terms and formal models with a hands-on approach. While moving the study of the philosophy of science out of the parlor and into the lab, he often comes up with original results from the psychology of learning to the theory of measurement and quantum mechanics. This book searches for a common thread in Suppes’s multifaceted work through a series of conversations with the man himself and illuminates many of the more challenging aspects of his philosophy.
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cover of Formal Objects: On Beauty and Sustainability

Formal Objects

On Beauty and Sustainability

Robert Hariman

University of Chicago Press, 2027

A bold invitation to learn sustainability from the aesthetic forms that pattern our world.

If we are to survive the ecological crisis, we must develop a new orientation to the world that draws us into better relationships with nature and one another. Robert Hariman believes that, as a first step, we must cultivate a renewed appreciation for the beauty at the center of reality. We must learn again, he argues, to see forms: the rhythms, shapes, and textures that evoke connection and pleasure. To that end, Formal Objects applies literary, philosophical, and art historical concepts to reimagine an often-ignored theory called formalism. This perspective is developed through visual motifs that are found in nature and the decorative arts, and it invites us to become attuned to rich patterns of reciprocity. Once we recognize the beauty in the world, we can move in step with its abundance to design more just and sustainable communities.

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cover of Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism

Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values

A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism

Max Scheler

Northwestern University Press, 1973

A lengthy critique of Kant's apriorism precedes discussions on the ethical principles of eudaemonism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, and positivism.
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cover of Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record

Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record

Michael Brian Schiffer

University of Utah Press, 1987

This handbook synthesizes the most important principles of cultural and environmental formation processes for both students and practicing archaeologists.

Formation Process of the Archaeological Record embodies a vision that the cultural past is knowable, but only when the nature of the evidence is thoroughly understood. It shows how the past is accessible in practice by identifying variability introduced by the diverse effects of people and nature that in some sum, form the archaeological record.

For students, it is intended as both an introduction and guide in method and theory, field work, and analysis. Practicing archaeologists will find it a valuable checklist of sources of variability when observations on the archaeological record are used to justify inferences.

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cover of Formerly God: Rethinking God after God

Formerly God

Rethinking God after God

Rick Benjamins

Amsterdam University Press, 2026

God is and remains a meaningful term, even after “the death of God,” but its meaning is by no means clear or unambiguous. Clearly and with a broad perspective, this book challenges classical theology with the criticism that “onto-theology” is no longer possible today and shows in what drastically changed way it might “survive.” It shows how the academic theological conversation about God after God has developed over time and in different places.
This book begins with the controversial work of Dutch theologian Harry Kuitert, who bid farewell to old representations of God but got stuck finding new ones. It turns back to the important and indispensable insights of Hegel and Heidegger. It presents contemporary post-theistic thinking about God, using German, French, and American thinkers, distinguishing interpretive theologians, deconstructionists, and constructive theologians, finally formulating a new position.
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cover of Forming Humanity: Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition

Forming Humanity

Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition

Jennifer A. Herdt

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Now in paperback, Forming Humanity reveals bildung, or ethical formation, as the key to post-Kantian thought.

Kant’s proclamation of humankind’s emergence from “self-incurred immaturity” left his contemporaries with a puzzle: What models should we use to sculpt ourselves if we no longer look to divine grace or received authorities?  Deftly uncovering the roots of this question in Rhineland mysticism, Pietist introspection, and the rise of the bildungsroman, Jennifer A. Herdt reveals bildung, or ethical formation, as the key to post-Kantian thought. This was no simple process of secularization, in which human beings took responsibility for something they had earlier left in the hands of God.  Rather, theorists of bildung, from Herder through Goethe to Hegel, championed human agency in self-determination while working out the social and political implications of our creation in the image of God.  While bildung was invoked to justify racism and colonialism by stigmatizing those deemed resistant to self-cultivation, it also nourished ideals of dialogical encounter and mutual recognition.  Herdt reveals how the project of forming humanity lives on in our ongoing efforts to grapple with this complicated legacy.
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cover of Forms in the Abyss: A Philosophical Bridge Between Sartre and Derrida

Forms in the Abyss

A Philosophical Bridge Between Sartre and Derrida

Steve Martinot

Temple University Press, 2007

The relationship between the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre and the post-structuralist Jecques Derrida has never been fully examined until now. In Forms in the Abyss, Steve Martinot finds, between these two important philosophical thinkers of the twentieth century, "a common uncommonality" by which he sees them confront each other as "kindred souls" despite their vast differences.

Martinot argues that a bridge between these two thinkers can be constructed.  He demonstrates that one can use the critical tools provided by Derrida, and the forms of discourse and reasoning developed by Sartre, to set the two in dialogue with each other. In the process, Martinot develops a theory of dialogue that incorporates both ethics and form and contributes a new way of thinking about critical and social theory.  More importantly, he adds a new ethical and political imperative to postmodern thought that many dritics have often found missing in the works of thinkers like Derrida.
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cover of Forms of Blackness: Race and Visibility in the French-Speaking World

Forms of Blackness

Race and Visibility in the French-Speaking World

Cécile Bishop

Duke University Press, 2025

Forms of Blackness examines how race can be approached as a form shaped and perceived through visual and aesthetic practices. Cécile Bishop offers a new way of thinking about the politics of visibility and presses readers to question how to interpret what they see.

Considering race as form across literature, theory, painting, and photography, Cécile Bishop’s Forms of Blackness explores the formal devices that make blackness both visible and recognizable. In keeping with black Francophone theorists like Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon, Bishop uses the ambiguities these aesthetic forms carry to explore a range of identity concepts like opacity, formlessness, and doubleness. Bishop puts blackness-as-race and blackness-as-form in dialogue, showing how race disrupts the concept of artistic autonomy and how the aesthetic challenges race as a self-evident visual phenomenon. When thought together, form does not isolate blackness from race but rather calls attention to the material substrate that turns race into a phenomenon that can be experienced through sense perception. Moving between careful analysis and experimental modes of critique, Forms of Blackness offers a new way of thinking about the politics of visibility and offers a pressing invitation to question the ways we interpret what we see.
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cover of Fortress Power: Hostile Designs and the Politics of Spatial Control

Fortress Power

Hostile Designs and the Politics of Spatial Control

Derek S. Denman

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

A compelling treatise on the relationship between power and enclosure

Fortress Power presents a genealogy of fortification as a material and political technology intent on obstruction, tracing its implementation across battlefields, borders, and urban environments. Drawing on the influential work of philosophers Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, Derek S. Denman places the fortress alongside the archetypes of the prison and the camp, citing them as paradigmatic of how space is transformed into a tool of domination and control.

Focusing on the defensive architecture of bastion fortresses, urban design, and border landscapes, Fortress Power charts the rise of a form of governance grounded in hostility, extending the scope of its subject from a piece of military construction to a much broader political concept. Detailing how power manifests in everything from city centers to international boundaries, the book analyzes the logic of fortification as it moves through various contexts in the advancement of surveillance, exploitation, warfare, and political authority.

Through a unique blend of architecture and design studies, political theory, international relations, geography, and migration studies, Denman outlines the disquieting legacy of the fortress to highlight its role in the formation of modern government and the enactment of violence. In an era marked by the increasing prevalence of authoritarian power and conflicting geopolitical boundaries, he presents an insightful investigation of the weaponization of the built environment.

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cover of Forty-Nine Steps

Forty-Nine Steps

Roberto Calasso

University of Minnesota Press, 2001

The first treatment of contemporary thought by the acclaimed cultural critic. In books lauded as "brilliant,"* "exhilarating,"** and "profound,"*** Roberto Calasso has revealed the unexpected intersections of ancient and modern through topics ranging from Greek and Indian mythology to what a legendary African kingdom can tell us about the French Revolution. In this first translation of his most important essays, Calasso brings his powerful intellect and elegant prose style to bear on the essential thinkers of our time, providing a sweeping analysis of the current state of Western culture. "Forty-nine steps" refers to the Talmudic doctrine that there are forty-nine steps to meaning in every passage of the Torah. Employing this interpretive approach, Calasso offers a "secret history" of European literature and philosophy in the wake of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Calasso analyzes how figures ranging from Gustav Flaubert, Gottfried Benn, Karl Kraus, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, and Theodor Adorno have contributed to, or been emblematic of, the current state of Western thought. The book's theme, writ large, is the power of fable-specifically, its persistence in art and literature despite its exclusion from orthodox philosophy. In its breadth and the nature of its concerns, The Forty-nine Steps is a philosophical and literary twin to the widely-praised The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Combining erudition with engaging prose and original insights, Calasso contributes a daring new interpretation of some of the most challenging writers of the past 150 years. Roberto Calasso is the author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1993), The Ruin of Kasch (1994), Ka (1998), and Literature and the Gods (2000). He is the publisher of Adelphi Edizioni and lives in Milan. John Shepley is a freelance writer and translator who lives in New York City. His translation of Pasolini's Roman Nights and Other Stories won the first Italo Calvino Translation Award in 1987.
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cover of Foucault

Foucault

Gilles Deleuze

University of Minnesota Press, 1988

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cover of Foucault And Heidegger: Critical Encounters

Foucault And Heidegger

Critical Encounters

Alan Milchman

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

An essential consideration of these two closely related and influential figures. Michel Foucault and Martin Heidegger are two of the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century, and yet there are significant, largely unexplored questions about the relationship between their projects. Foucault and Heidegger stages a crucial critical encounter between these two thinkers; in doing so, it clarifies not only the complexities of the Heidegger-Foucault relationship, but also their relevance to questions about truth and nihilism, acquiescence and resistance, and technology and agency that are central to debates in contemporary thought. These essays examine topics ranging from Heidegger's and Foucault's intellectual forebears to their respective understanding of the Enlightenment, modernity, and technology, to their conceptions of power and the political. Contributors: Hubert L. Dreyfus, Stuart Elden, Béatrice Han, Steven V. Hicks, Ladelle McWhorter, Jana Sawicki, Michael Schwartz, Charles E. Scott, William V. Spanos, Leslie Paul Thiele, Rudi Visker, Edith Wyschogrod. Alan Milchman is lecturer in political science and Alan Rosenberg is associate professor of philosophy, both at Queens College, City University of New York.
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Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability

Shelley L. Tremain

University of Michigan Press, 2017

Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability is a distinctive contribution to growing discussions about how power operates within the academic field of philosophy. By combining the work of Michel Foucault, the insights of philosophy of disability and feminist philosophy, and data derived from empirical research, Shelley L. Tremain compellingly argues that the conception of disability that currently predominates in the discipline of philosophy, according to which disability is a natural disadvantage or personal misfortune, is inextricably intertwined with the underrepresentation of disabled philosophers in the profession of philosophy. Against the understanding of disability that prevails in subfields of philosophy such as bioethics, cognitive science, ethics, and political philosophy, Tremain elaborates a new conception of disability as a historically specifi c and culturally relative apparatus of power. Although the book zeros in on the demographics of and biases embedded in academic philosophy, it will be invaluable to everyone who is concerned about the social, economic, institutional, and political subordination of disabled people.
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Foucault and His Interlocutors

Edited by Arnold I. Davidson

University of Chicago Press, 1997

Containing the debate between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky on epistemology and politics, this book also features the most significant essays by the most important French thinkers who influenced and were influenced by Foucault. Foucault's teachers, colleagues, and collaborators take up his major claims, from his first to final works, and provide us with the authoritative context in which to understand Foucault's writings.

This volume also includes several important works by Foucault previously unpublished in English. The other contributors are Georges Canguilhem, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Hadot, Michel Serres, and Paul Veyne.

Here for the first time is the French Foucault.

This volume offers lucid and important texts that will appeal to students and professors at every level of study. It is essential reading for all scholars of twentieth-century philosophy and critical theory.
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Foucault and the Government of Disability

Shelley Tremain, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2005


Foucault and the Government of Disability is the first book-length investigation of the relevance and importance of the ideas of Michel Foucault to the field of disability studies-and vice versa. Over the last thirty years, politicized conceptions of disability have precipitated significant social change, including the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, the redesign of urban landscapes, the appearance of closed-captioning on televisions, and the growing recognition that disabled people constitute a marginalized and disenfranchised constituency.

The provocative essays in this volume respond to Foucault's call to question what is regarded as natural, inevitable, ethical, and liberating, while they challenge established understandings of Foucault's analyses and offer fresh approaches to his work. The book's roster of distinguished international contributors represents a broad range of disciplines and perspectives, making this a timely and necessary addition to the burgeoning field of disability studies.

 
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Foucault and the Government of Disability

Shelley Tremain, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2005

Foucault and the Government of Disability considers the continued relevance of Foucault to disability studies, as well as the growing significance of disability studies to understandings of Foucault. A decade ago, this international collection provocatively responded to Foucault’s call to question what is regarded as natural, inevitable, ethical, and liberating. The book’s contributors draw on Foucault to scrutinize a range of widely endorsed practices and ideas surrounding disability, including rehabilitation, community care, impairment, normality and abnormality, inclusion, prevention, accommodation, and special education. In this revised and expanded edition, four new essays extend and elaborate the lines of inquiry by problematizing (to use Foucault’s term) the epistemological, political, and ethical character of the supercrip, the racialized war on autism, the performativity of intellectual disability, and the potent mixture of neoliberalism and biopolitics in the context of physician-assisted suicide.

“[A]n important, prescient, and necessary contribution…a kind of litmus test for the efficacy of Foucault’s concepts in the study of disability, concepts that lead to a refusal of the biological essentialism implied in the disability/impairment binary.”
—Foucault Studies

“Tremain has done an exceptional job at organizing and procuring important, rigorously argued, and entertaining essays…. This book should be a mandatory read for anyone interested in contemporary philosophical debates surrounding the experience of disability."
—Essays in Philosophy

“A beautiful exploration of how Foucault’s analytics of power and genealogies of discursive knowledges can open up new avenues for thinking critically about phenomena that many of us take to be inevitable and thus new ways of resisting and possibly at times redirecting the forces that shape our lives. Every scholar, every person with an interest in Foucault or in political theory generally, needs to read this book.”
—Ladelle McWhorter, University of Richmond  


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Foucault and the Iranian Revolution

Gender and the Seductions of Islamism

Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson

University of Chicago Press, 2005

In 1978, as the protests against the Shah of Iran reached their zenith, philosopher Michel Foucault was working as a special correspondent for Corriere della Sera and le Nouvel Observateur. During his little-known stint as a journalist, Foucault traveled to Iran, met with leaders like Ayatollah Khomeini, and wrote a series of articles on the revolution. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution is the first book-length analysis of these essays on Iran, the majority of which have never before appeared in English. Accompanying the analysis are annotated translations of the Iran writings in their entirety and the at times blistering responses from such contemporaneous critics as Middle East scholar Maxime Rodinson as well as comments on the revolution by feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir.

In this important and controversial account, Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson illuminate Foucault's support of the Islamist movement. They also show how Foucault's experiences in Iran contributed to a turning point in his thought, influencing his ideas on the Enlightenment, homosexuality, and his search for political spirituality. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution informs current discussion on the divisions that have reemerged among Western intellectuals over the response to radical Islamism after September 11. Foucault's provocative writings are thus essential for understanding the history and the future of the West's relationship with Iran and, more generally, to political Islam. In their examination of these journalistic pieces, Afary and Anderson offer a surprising glimpse into the mind of a celebrated thinker.
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cover of Foucault and the Kamasutra: The Courtesan, the Dandy, and the Birth of Ars Erotica as Theater in India

Foucault and the Kamasutra

The Courtesan, the Dandy, and the Birth of Ars Erotica as Theater in India

Sanjay K. Gautam

University of Chicago Press, 2016

The Kamasutra is best known in the West for its scandalous celebration of unbridled sensuality. Yet, there is much, much more to it; embedded in the text is a vision of the city founded on art and aesthetic pleasure. In Foucault and the "Kamasutra", Sanjay K. Gautam lays out the nature and origin of this iconic Indian text and engages in the first serious reading of its relationship with Foucault.

Gautam shows how closely intertwined the history of erotics in Indian culture is with the history of theater-aesthetics grounded in the discourse of love, and Foucault provides the framework for opening up an intellectual horizon of Indian thought. To do this, Gautam looks to the history of three inglorious characters in classical India: the courtesan and her two closest male companions—her patron, the dandy consort; and her teacher and advisor, the dandy guru. Foucault’s distinction between erotic arts and the science of sexuality drives Gautam’s exploration of the courtesan as a symbol of both sexual-erotic and aesthetic pleasure. In the end, by entwining together Foucault’s works on the history of sexuality in the West and the classical Indian texts on eros, Gautam transforms our understanding of both, even as he opens up new ways of investigating erotics, aesthetics, gender relations, and subjectivity.
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Foucault in Iran

Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi

University of Minnesota Press, 2016

Were the thirteen essays Michel Foucault wrote in 1978–1979 endorsing the Iranian Revolution an aberration of his earlier work or an inevitable pitfall of his stance on Enlightenment rationality, as critics have long alleged? Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi argues that the critics are wrong. He declares that Foucault recognized that Iranians were at a threshold and were considering if it were possible to think of dignity, justice, and liberty outside the cognitive maps and principles of the European Enlightenment. 

Foucault in Iran centers not only on the significance of the great thinker’s writings on the revolution but also on the profound mark the event left on his later lectures on ethics, spirituality, and fearless speech. Contemporary events since 9/11, the War on Terror, and the Arab Uprisings have made Foucault’s essays on the Iranian Revolution more relevant than ever. Ghamari-Tabrizi illustrates how Foucault saw in the revolution an instance of his antiteleological philosophy: here was an event that did not fit into the normative progressive discourses of history. What attracted him to the Iranian Revolution was precisely its ambiguity.

Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, this interdisciplinary work will spark a lively debate in its insistence that what informed Foucault’s writing was not an effort to understand Islamism but, rather, his conviction that Enlightenment rationality has not closed the gate of unknown possibilities for human societies. 

[more]
cover of Foucault's Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life

Foucault's Askesis

An Introduction to the Philosophical Life

Edward McGushin

Northwestern University Press, 2007

In his renowned courses at the Collège de France from 1982 to 1984, Michel Foucault devoted his lectures to meticulous readings and interpretations of the works of Plato, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, among others. In this his aim was not, Edward F. McGushin contends, to develop a new knowledge of the history of philosophy; rather, it was to let himself be transformed by the very activity of thinking. Thus, this work shows us Foucault in the last phase of his life in the act of becoming a philosopher. Here we see how his encounter with ancient philosophy allowed him to experience the practice of philosophy as, to paraphrase Nietzsche, a way of becoming who one is: the work of self-formation that the Greeks called askēsis.

Through a detailed study of Foucault's last courses, McGushin demonstrates that this new way of practicing philosophical askēsis evokes Foucault's ethical resistance to modern relations of power and knowledge. In order to understand Foucault's later project, then, it is necessary to see it within the context of his earlier work. If his earlier projects represented an attempt to bring to light the relations of power and knowledge that narrowed and limited freedom, then this last project represents his effort to take back that freedom by redefining it in terms of care of the self. Foucault always stressed that modern power functions by producing individual subjects. This book shows how his excavation of ancient philosophical practices gave him the tools to counter this function-with a practice of self-formation, an askēsis.
[more]
cover of Foucault's Discipline: The Politics of Subjectivity

Foucault's Discipline

The Politics of Subjectivity

John S. Ransom

Duke University Press, 1997

In Foucault’s Discipline, John S. Ransom extracts a distinctive vision of the political world—and oppositional possibilities within it—from the welter of disparate topics and projects Michel Foucault pursued over his lifetime. Uniquely, Ransom presents Foucault as a political theorist in the tradition of Weber and Nietzsche, and specifically examines Foucault’s work in relation to the political tradition of liberalism and the Frankfurt School. By concentrating primarily on Discipline and Punish and the later Foucauldian texts, Ransom provides a fresh interpretation of this controversial philosopher’s perspectives on concepts such as freedom, right, truth, and power.
Foucault’s Discipline demonstrates how Foucault’s valorization of descriptive critique over prescriptive plans of action can be applied to the decisively altered political landscape of the end of this millennium. By reconstructing the philosopher’s arguments concerning the significance of disciplinary institutions, biopower, subjectivity, and forms of resistance in modern society, Ransom shows how Foucault has provided a different way of looking at and responding to contemporary models of government—in short, a new depiction of the political world.
[more]
cover of Foucault, Politics, and Violence

Foucault, Politics, and Violence

Johnanna Oksala

Northwestern University Press, 2012

In her book, Oksala shows that the arguments for the ineliminability of violence from the political are often based on excessively broad, ontological conceptions of violence distinct from its concrete and physical meaning and, on the other hand, on a restrictively narrow and empirical understanding of politics as the realm of conventional political institutions.
[more]
cover of Foundations and Methods from Mathematics to Neuroscience: Essays Inspired by Patrick Suppes

Foundations and Methods from Mathematics to Neuroscience

Essays Inspired by Patrick Suppes

Edited by Colleen E Crangle, Adolfo García de la Sienra, and Helen E. Longino

CSLI, 2014

During his long and continuing scholarly career, Patrick Suppes has contributed significantly both to the sciences and to scientific philosophies. In this volume, an international group of Suppes’s colleagues, collaborators, and students seeks to build upon Suppes’s insights. Each of their essays is accompanied by a response from Suppes himself, which together create a uniquely engaging dialogue. Suppes and his peers explore a diverse array of topics including the relationship between science and philosophy; the philosophy of physics; problems in the foundations of mathematics; theory of measurement, decision theory, and probability; the foundations of economics and political theory; psychology, language, and the philosophy of language; Suppes’s most recent research in neurobiology; and the alignment (or misalignment) of method and policy.
[more]
cover of Foundations of Black Epistemology: Knowledge Discourse in Africana Philosophy

Foundations of Black Epistemology

Knowledge Discourse in Africana Philosophy

Adebayo Oluwayomi

Temple University Press, 2025

Foundations of Black Epistemology is Adebayo Oluwayomi’s bold endeavor to delineate Black epistemology as a new sub-disciplinary focus in contemporary Africana or Black philosophy. He engages in a rigorous historical study of Black intellectual history to show how seminal Black thinkers have long been interested in and engaged with questions concerning the phenomenon of human knowledge, and questions around human agency, including practical considerations regarding the social and political value of knowledge.

Foundations of Black Epistemology examines writings by Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, Steve Bantu Biko, Huey P. Newton, and Kathleen Neal Cleaver. Each chapter addresses issues of self-knowledge, self-assertion, Black consciousness, or anticolonialism and its relation to personal and political epistemologies.

Oluwayomi offers innovative perspectives on the formulation, deduction, and interrogation of epistemological themes within Black Africana philosophy. By considering the important epistemological theories and arguments in Black philosophy particularly in the last 150 to 200 years, Foundations of Black Epistemology promises to generate new discussions around this necessary field of Black Africana philosophy.
[more]
cover of Foundations of Logic: Completeness, Incompleteness, Computability

Foundations of Logic

Completeness, Incompleteness, Computability

Dag Westerståhl

CSLI, 2023

A comprehensive introduction to logic’s central concepts.

This book provides a concise but detailed account of modern logic's three cornerstones: the completeness of first-order logic, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, and Turing's analysis of computability. In addition to the central text, an appendix explains the required technical terminology and facts. The main ideas behind the three cornerstones are explained in a simple, easy-to-grasp manner, and it is possible to select among the chapters and sections so that the reader becomes familiar with these ideas, even if some technicalities are skipped or postponed. A wealth of exercises accompany a wide selection of materials, including the histories and philosophical implications of the three main premises, making it useful as a textbook for undergraduate or graduate courses focusing on any of the three main themes. The material is rigorous and detailed but keeps the main ideas in sight, and there are numerous excursions into more advanced material for curious readers to explore. 
[more]
cover of Fragile Finitude: A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology

Fragile Finitude

A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology

Michael Fishbane

University of Chicago Press, 2021

The world we engage with is a vibrant collage brought to consciousness by language and our creative imagination. It is through the symbolic forms of language that the human world of value is revealed—this is where religious scholar Michael Fishbane dwells in his latest contribution to Jewish thought.

In Fragile Finitude, Fishbane clears new ground for a theological life through a novel reinterpretation of the Book of Job. On this basis, he offers a contemporary engagement with the four classical types of Jewish Scriptural exegesis. The first focuses on worldly experience, the second on communal forms of practice and thought in the rabbinical tradition, the third on personal development, and the fourth on transcendent, cosmic orientations. Through these four modes, Fishbane manages to transform Jewish theology from within, at once reinvigorating a long tradition and moving beyond it. What he offers is nothing short of a way to reorient our lives in relation to the divine and our fellow humans. Written from within the Jewish tradition, Fragile Finitude is intended for readers across the religious spectrum.
[more]
cover of Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism

Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism

Edited by Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy

The Ohio State University Press, 2016

Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism brings together scholars working in prehistoric, classical, medieval, and early modern studies who are developing, from longer and slower historical perspectives, critical post/humanisms that explore: 1) the significance (historical, sociocultural, psychic, etc.) of human expression and affectivity; 2) the impact of technology and new sciences on what it means to be a human self; 3) the importance of art and literature in defining and enacting human selves; 4) the importance of history in defining the human; 5) the artistic plasticity of the human; 6) the question of a human collectivity—what is the value, and peril, of “being human” or “being post/human” together?; and finally, 7) the constructive, and destructive, relations (aesthetic, historical, and philosophical) of the human to the nonhuman.
 
This volume, edited by Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy, insists on the always provisional and contingent formations of the human, and of various humanisms, over time, while also aiming to demonstrate the different ways these formations emerge (and also disappear) in different times and places, from the most ancient past to the most contemporary present. The essays are offered as “fragments” because the authors do not believe there can ever be a “total history” of either the human or the post/human as they play themselves out in differing historical contexts. At the same time, the volume as a whole argues that defining what “the human” (or “post/human”) is has always been an ongoing, never finished cultural project.
[more]
cover of Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender, and the Space of Modernity

Fragments of Development

Nation, Gender, and the Space of Modernity

Suzanne Bergeron

University of Michigan Press, 2005

"A bold and challenging consideration of questions of development, economic globalization, communities and subjectivity from a unique feminist perspective. A must-read book for those who wish to understand restructuring and resistance in this era of intensified globalization."
---Isabella C. Bakker, York University

"Bergeron's pathbreaking analysis challenges orthodox development theories, questions current feminist economic thinking and highlights crucial new gendered challenges to globalization."
---Jane Parpart, Dalhousie University

"Cutting-edge scholarship. Bergeron deftly engages the complexity of current debates while retaining clarity, improving analyses, and illuminating alternatives."
---V. S. Peterson, University of Arizona


By tracing out the intersection between the imagined space of the national economy and the gendered construction of "expert" knowledge in development thought, Suzanne Bergeron provides a provocative analysis of development discourse and practice. By elaborating a framework of including/excluding economic subjects and activities in development economics, she provides a rich account of the role that economists have played in framing the contested political and cultural space of development.

Bergeron's account of the construction of the national economy as an object of development policy follows its shifting meanings through modernization and growth models, dependency theory, structural adjustment, and contemporary debates about globalization and highlights how intersections of nation and economy are based on gendered and colonial scripts. The author's analysis of development debates effectively demonstrates that critics of development who ignore economists' nation stories may actually bolster the formation they are attempting to subvert. Fragments of Development is essential reading for those interested in development studies, feminist economics, international political economy, and globalization studies.
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cover of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

David Graeber

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004

Everywhere anarchism is on the upswing as a political philosophy—everywhere, that is, except the academy. Anarchists repeatedly appeal to anthropologists for ideas about how society might be reorganized on a more egalitarian, less alienating basis. Anthropologists, terrified of being accused of romanticism, respond with silence . . . . But what if they didn't?

This pamphlet ponders what that response would be, and explores the implications of linking anthropology to anarchism. Here, David Graeber invites readers to imagine this discipline that currently only exists in the realm of possibility: anarchist anthropology.
[more]
cover of Fragments: The Existential Situation of Our Time: Selected Essays, Volume 1

Fragments

The Existential Situation of Our Time: Selected Essays, Volume 1

David Tracy

University of Chicago Press, 2020

Two volumes of selected essays from the most important Catholic theologian in North America.
 
David Tracy is widely considered one of the most important religious thinkers in North America, known for his pluralistic vision and disciplinary breadth. His first books in more than twenty years, Fragments and Filaments reflect Tracy’s range and erudition, collecting essays from the 1980s to 2018 into a two-volume work.

In the first volume, Fragments, Tracy gathers his most important essays on broad theological questions, beginning with the problem of suffering across Greek tragedy, Christianity, and Buddhism. The volume goes on to address the Infinite, and the many attempts to categorize and name it by Plato, Aristotle, Rilke, Heidegger, and others. In the remaining essays, he reflects on questions of the invisible, contemplation, hermeneutics, and public theology. Throughout, Tracy evokes the potential of fragments (understood both as concepts and events) to shatter closed systems and open us to difference and Infinity. Covering science, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and non-Western religious traditions, Tracy provides in Fragments a guide for any open reader to rethink our fragmenting contemporary culture.
[more]
cover of Framing Public Memory

Framing Public Memory

Edited by Kendall R. Phillips

University of Alabama Press, 2007

A collection of essays by prominent scholars from many disciplines on the construction of public memories

The study of public memory has grown rapidly across numerous disciplines in recent years, among them American studies, history, philosophy, sociology, architecture, and communications. As scholars probe acts of collective remembrance, they have shed light on the cultural processes of memory. Essays contained in this volume address issues such as the scope of public memory, the ways we forget, the relationship between politics and memory, and the material practices of memory.

Stephen Browne’s contribution studies the alternative to memory erasure, silence, and forgetting as posited by Hannah Arendt in her classic Eichmann in Jerusalem. Rosa Eberly writes about the Texas tower shootings of 1966, memories of which have been minimized by local officials. Charles Morris examines public reactions to Larry Kramer’s declaration that Abraham Lincoln was homosexual, horrifying the guardians of Lincoln’s public memory. And Barbie Zelizer considers the impact on public memory of visual images, specifically still photographs of individuals about to perish (e.g., people falling from the World Trade Center) and the sense of communal loss they manifest.

Whether addressing the transitory and mutable nature of collective memories over time or the ways various groups maintain, engender, or resist those memories, this work constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of how public memory has been and might continue to be framed.
 
[more]
cover of Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

Francis Bacon

The Logic of Sensation

Gilles Deleuze

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

Translated and with an Introduction by Daniel W. Smith
 Afterword by Tom Conley 

Gilles Deleuze had several paintings by Francis Bacon hanging in his Paris apartment, and the painter’s method and style as well as his motifs of seriality, difference, and repetition influenced Deleuze’s work. This first English translation shows us one of the most original and important French philosophers of the twentieth century in intimate confrontation with one of that century’s most original and important painters. 

In considering Bacon, Deleuze offers implicit and explicit insights into the origins and development of his own philosophical and aesthetic ideas, ideas that represent a turning point in his intellectual trajectory. First published in French in 1981, Francis Bacon has come to be recognized as one of Deleuze’s most significant texts in aesthetics. Anticipating his work on cinema, the baroque, and literary criticism, the book can be read not only as a study of Bacon’s paintings but also as a crucial text within Deleuze’s broader philosophy of art. 

In it, Deleuze creates a series of philosophical concepts, each of which relates to a particular aspect of Bacon’s paintings but at the same time finds a place in the “general logic of sensation.” Illuminating Bacon’s paintings, the nonrational logic of sensation, and the act of painting itself, this work—presented in lucid and nuanced translation—also points beyond painting toward connections with other arts such as music, cinema, and literature. Francis Bacon is an indispensable entry point into the conceptual proliferation of Deleuze’s philosophy as a whole. 

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, Vincennes–St. Denis. He coauthored Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus with Félix Guattari. These works, as well as Cinema 1, Cinema 2, The Fold, Proust and Signs, and others, are published in English by Minnesota. 

Daniel W. Smith teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University.
[more]
cover of Frank Lloyd Wright and His Manner of Thought

Frank Lloyd Wright and His Manner of Thought

Jerome Klinkowitz

University of Wisconsin Press, 2014

An iconic figure in American culture, Frank Lloyd Wright is famous throughout the world. Although his achievements in architecture are stunning, it is his importance in cultural history, Jerome Klinkowitz contends, that makes Wright the object of such avid and continuing interest. Designing more than just buildings, Wright offered a concept for living that still influences how people conduct their lives today. Wright's innovations in architecture have been widely studied, but this is the most comprehensive and sustained treatment of his thought.
            Klinkowitz presents a critical biography driven by the architect's own work and intellectual growth, focusing on the evolution of Wright's thinking and writings from his first public addresses in 1894 to his last essay in 1959. Did Wright reject all of Victorian thinking about the home, or do his attentions to a minister's sermon on "the house beautiful" deserve closer attention? Was Wright echoing the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, or was he more in step with the philosophy of William James? Did he reject the Arts and Crafts movement, or repurpose its beliefs and practices for new times? And, what can be said of his deep dissatisfaction with architectural concepts of his own era, the dominant modernism that became the International Style? Even the strongest advocates of Frank Lloyd Wright have been puzzled by his objections to so much that characterized the twentieth century, from ideas for building to styles of living.
            In Frank Lloyd Wright and His Manner of Thought, Klinkowitz, a widely published authority on twentieth-century literature, thought, and culture, examines the full extent of Wright's books, essays, and lectures to show how he emerged from the nineteenth century to anticipate the twenty-first.

Outstanding Book, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers
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cover of Franklin's Thrift: The Lost History of an American Virtue

Franklin's Thrift

The Lost History of an American Virtue

David Blankenhorn

Templeton Press, 2009

Americans today often think of thrift as a negative value—a miserly hoarding of resources and a denial of pleasure. Even more telling, many Americans don’t even think of thrift at all anymore. Franklin’s Thrift challenges this state of mind by recovering the rich history of thrift as a quintessentially American virtue.

The contributors to this volume trace how the idea and practice of thrift have been a vital part of the American vision of economic freedom and social abundance. For Benjamin Franklin, who personified and promoted the idea, thrift meant working productively, consuming wisely, saving proportionally, and giving generously. Franklin’s thrift became the cornerstone of a new kind of secular faith in the ordinary person’s capacity to shape his lot and fortune in life. Later chapters document how thrift moved into new domains in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It became the animating idea behind social movements to promote children’s school savings, create mutual savings banks and credit unions for working men and women, establish a federal savings bond program, and galvanize the nation to conserve resources during two world wars.

Historians, enthusiasts of Americana or traditional American virtues, and anyone interested in resolving our society’s current financial woes will find much to treasure in this diverse collection, with topics ranging from the inspirational lessons we can learn from the film It’s a Wonderful Life to a history of the roles played by mutual savings banks, credit unions, and thrift stores in America’s national thrift movement. It also includes actual policy recommendations for our present situation.

[more]
cover of Fredric Jameson and Film Theory: Marxism, Allegory, and Geopolitics in World Cinema

Fredric Jameson and Film Theory

Marxism, Allegory, and Geopolitics in World Cinema

Keith B. Wagner

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Frederic Jameson and Film Theory is the first collection of its kind, it assesses and critically responds to Fredric Jameson’s remarkable contribution to film theory. The essays assembled explore key Jamesonian concepts—such as totality, national allegory, geopolitics, globalization, representation, and pastiche—and his historical schema of realism, modernism, and postmodernism, considering, in both cases, how these can be applied, revised, expanded and challenged within film studies. Featuring essays by leading and emerging voices in the field, the volume probes the contours and complexities of neoliberal capitalism across the globe and explores world cinema's situation within these forces by deploying and adapting Jamesonian concepts, and placing them in dialogue with other theoretical paradigms. The result is an innovative and rigorously analytical effort that offers a range of Marxist-inspired approaches towards cinemas from Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America in the spirit of Jameson's famous rallying cry: 'always historicize!'.  
[more]
cover of Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism

Fredric Jameson

The Project of Dialectical Criticism

Robert T. Tally

Pluto Press, 2014

Fredric Jameson is the most important Marxist critic in the world today. While consistently operating at the cutting edge of literary and cultural studies, Jameson has remained committed to seemingly old-fashioned philosophical discourses, most notably dialectical criticism and utopian thought.

In Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism, Robert Tally surveys Jameson’s entire oeuvre, from his early studies of Sartre and formal criticism through his engagements with postmodernism and globalisation to his recent readings of Hegel, Marx and the valences of the dialectic.

The book is both a comprehensive critical guide to Jameson’s theoretical project and itself a convincing argument for the power of dialectical criticism to understand the world today.

[more]
cover of Free Up Yuhself: Transgressive Bodies and Contestations in the Carnivalesque

Free Up Yuhself

Transgressive Bodies and Contestations in the Carnivalesque

Nikoli A. Attai

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Free Up Yuhself explores and theorizes what it means to embody and be empowered by the chaos of transgression, evaluating the implications for people who destabilize the Caribbean region’s dominant gender and sexuality politics within the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora. This book examines how people actively utilize the carnivalesque—spaces of festivity and places of excitement, the extraordinary, the ritualistic—to confront, negotiate, disrupt, and transgress normative trends, boundaries, and perspectives in the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora communities. This book is particularly concerned with the ways that Caribbean people contest sexual and gendered expectations through their bodily performances across regional and diasporic festival spaces. Through illustrative, analytical, evaluative, and reflective chapters, the collection contemplates the themes of freedom, belonging, acceptance, and recognition as these affect the experience of people’s sense of being. The authors reflect on “freeing up” as a contentious politics, understanding that people have the capacity to enact their freedom through transgressive movements and performances that persistently grapple with notions of respectability, agency, empowerment, disruption, and the meanings and consequences of their varied social and political locations.

[more]
cover of Freedom

Freedom

Zygmunt Bauman

University of Minnesota Press, 1989

[more]
cover of Freedom Beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal Individualism

Freedom Beyond Sovereignty

Reconstructing Liberal Individualism

Sharon R. Krause

University of Chicago Press, 2015

What does it mean to be free? We invoke the word frequently, yet the freedom of countless Americans is compromised by social inequalities that systematically undercut what they are able to do and to become. If we are to remedy these failures of freedom, we must move beyond the common assumption, prevalent in political theory and American public life, that individual agency is best conceived as a kind of personal sovereignty, or as self-determination or control over one’s actions.

In Freedom Beyond Sovereignty, Sharon R. Krause shows that individual agency is best conceived as a non-sovereign experience because our ability to act and affect the world depends on how other people interpret and respond to what we do. The intersubjective character of agency makes it vulnerable to the effects of social inequality, but it is never in a strict sense socially determined. The agency of the oppressed sometimes surprises us with its vitality. Only by understanding the deep dynamics of agency as simultaneously non-sovereign and robust can we remediate the failed freedom of those on the losing end of persistent inequalities and grasp the scope of our own responsibility for social change. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty brings the experiences of the oppressed to the center of political theory and the study of freedom. It fundamentally reconstructs liberal individualism and enables us to see human action, personal responsibility, and the meaning of liberty in a totally new light.
[more]
cover of Freedom In Our Lifetime: The Collected Writings Of Anton Muziwakhe Lembede

Freedom In Our Lifetime

The Collected Writings Of Anton Muziwakhe Lembede

Anton Muziwakhe Lembede

Ohio University Press, 1996

When a group of young political activists met in 1944 to launch the African National Congress Youth League, it included the nucleus of a remarkable generation of leaders who forged the struggle for freedom and equality in South Africa for the next half century: Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Jordan Ngubane, Ellen Kuzwayo, Albertina Smith, A. P. Mda, Dan Tloome, and David Bopape. It was Anton Lembede, however whom they chose as their first president.

Lembede, who had just begun practicing law in Johannesburg, was known for his sharp intellect, fiery personality, and unwavering commitment to the struggle at hand. The son of farm laborers from the district of Georgedale, Natal, Lembede had worked tirelessly to put himself through school and college, and then to qualify for the bachelor of laws degree. When he began law practice in 1943, he had also earned the respect of his fellows, not only for his intellectual achievements (which were many), but also for his dedication to the cause of freedom in South Africa. “I am,” he explained, “Africa’s own child.”

His untimely death in 1947 at the age of 33 sent a wave of grief through the Congress Youth, who had looked to him for moral as well as political leadership. With the publication of Freedom In Our Lifetime, the editors acknowledge Lembede’s early contribution to the freedom movement, in particular his passionate and eloquent articulation of the African-centered philosophy he called “Africanism.”

[more]
cover of Freedom Regained: The Possibility of Free Will

Freedom Regained

The Possibility of Free Will

Julian Baggini

University of Chicago Press, 2015

It’s a question that has puzzled philosophers and theologians for centuries and is at the heart of numerous political, social, and personal concerns: Do we have free will? In this cogent and compelling book, Julian Baggini explores the concept of free will from every angle, blending philosophy, sociology, and cognitive science to find rich new insights on the intractable questions that have plagued us. Are we products of our culture, or free agents within it? Are our neural pathways fixed early on by a mixture of nature and nurture, or is the possibility of comprehensive, intentional psychological change always open to us? And what, exactly, are we talking about when we talk about “freedom” anyway?

Freedom Regained brings the issues raised by the possibilities—and denials—of free will to thought-provoking life, drawing on scientific research and fascinating encounters with everyone from artists to prisoners to dissidents. He looks at what it means for us to be material beings in a universe of natural laws. He asks if there is any difference between ourselves and the brains from which we seem never able to escape. He throws down the wildcards and plays them to the fullest: What about art? What about addiction? What about twins? And he asks, of course, what this all means for politics.

Ultimately, Baggini challenges those who think free will is an illusion. Moving from doubt to optimism to a hedged acceptance of free will, he ultimately lands on a satisfying conclusion: it is something we earn. The result is a highly engaging, new, and more positive understanding of our sense of personal freedom, a freedom that is definitely worth having.
[more]